Key Stage 2 · Year 6 · ages 10 or 11
Year 6: topics explained for parents
Year 6 is the last year of primary school, and in May children sit the Key Stage 2 tests in reading, grammar, punctuation and spelling, and maths. Maths now includes ratio, a first look at algebra, long division and pie charts, while science covers the circulatory system, evolution and inheritance, light and circuits. Writing and science are judged by the teacher rather than tested.
English
- Drafting: grammar, narrative and précis
- Cohesion and organisational devices
- Editing for effect, tense, agreement and register
- Proofreading and performing writing
- Planning for audience and purpose
- Handwriting and speed
- Themes, comparisons and poetry
- Inference, prediction and summarising
- Figurative language, fact and opinion
- Discussing and debating books
- Reading widely and recommending books
- Dictionaries and thesaurus
- Spelling list: queue to yacht
- Endings -ant, -ance, -ent, -ence
- Endings -able, -ible, -ably, -ibly
- -fer words and hyphens
- ei after c and ough words
- Silent letters and confused words
- Spelling words: accommodate to convenience
- Spelling words: correspond to hindrance
- Spelling list: identity to pronunciation
- Endings -cious, -tious, -cial and -tial
- Prefixes, suffixes and silent letters
- Arguing, hypothesising and evaluating
- Public speaking, performance and register
- Active listening and discussion
- Noun phrases, modal verbs, relative clauses
- Semicolons, colons, hyphens and brackets
- Formal language, passive and perfect forms
- Roots, prefixes and suffixes in reading
- Active and passive voice
- Cohesion, ellipsis and layout devices
- Semi-colons, colons, dashes, bullets and hyphens
- Formal language, synonyms and antonyms
Maths
- Introduction to algebra
- Order of operations and multi-step problems
- Long multiplication and division
- Decimals, percentages and rounding
- Simplifying and calculating with fractions
- Four-quadrant coordinates, translation, reflection
- Angles, circles and nets
- Units, area and volume
- Numbers to 10,000,000 and negatives
- Ratio, percentages and scale factors
- Pie charts, line graphs and the mean
Science
Subjects taught across Key Stage 2
These subjects are planned across the whole key stage, so schools choose when in it each topic comes.